1-17-10 - Backyard Oak

So this project has turned out to be a flop.  I'm just going to have to accept that I won't be making daily updates.

In any case, I fooled around with the aperture and shutter speed for the exposures I took this morning.  It's a pretty gloomy morning out, so I had a good chance to figure out the differences in a wide-open aperture and a smaller one under such lighting conditions.  The shot above was the best one of the bunch.  For this one, I set the aperture to 3.5, shutter speed to 1.250 sec, and ISO of 400.  I also tried out the "monochrome" style setting and found that I liked these exposures better than the color ones.  There's something eerily appealing about a spanish moss-laden oak tree photographed in black & white.  Also, because of the muted natural light, the exposures taken in full color just looked muddied and unpleasant.

I undoubtedly need more practice with the simple mechanics of my camera.  One thing I'm itching to explore is playing around with the color saturation.  In due time, I suppose.

Well, there you have it--my first post in a while.  We'll see how I keep up with this.

1/2/10

So today was Intro to Depth of Field Day.  Yesterday, I kept the settings on fully automatic, but today, I wanted to see what I could do by playing around with some of the more creative settings. My homework in the evenings has been to study up on manipulating zoom, aperture, and shutter speed.  These are all things I'd like to explore more as I continue--I'll definitely need more practice.  For now, I'm content to have an object in the foreground that is sharply focused, with the background softly blurred.  It's pretty safe to say that I'll likely have more photos along these lines to showcase my new-found knowledge of depth of field!

What you're actually seeing here is a sculpture from the walkway behind the Medical School building on FSU campus.  The Nobel laureates from FSU's faculty are featured here, and I'm pretty sure this one is Dirac.

1/1/2010 - First Photo

Alright, so there you have it.  My first photo as part of my attempt to fulfill a year-long project of taking one photo each day.  This idea certainly isn't an original one of mine, but I thought it would be a fun one to try out this year.  I received the fantastic present of a Canon EOS Rebel XS Digital SLR camera for Christmas and I'm looking forward to learning more about how to use it in the coming months.  I'm expecting my initial photos to be pretty lackluster.  I have a lot to learn and it'll definitely be a while before I feel fully comfortable branching out into more exotic techniques.

The photo above is one side of the music building at FSU.  The gorgeous pink marble caught my eye on a previous walk through campus, and thought this would make for a nice entree into this project.

Hopefully I'll offer some visually interesting photos over the course of this year.  We shall see!